With job losses and redundancies looming large, firms have taken to the idea of reskilling their workforce with gusto

If you’re looking for the stars of the aviation world—the biggest airliners, the fiercest fighters, the swankiest private jets, the smartest drones—pack your bags for France.

Interpreters Barry Slaughter Olsen and Katty Kauffman face a series of challenges to test their abilities as interpreters. Can Katty translate a text message conversation in real time? Can Barry interpret a recorded speech that continually gets faster? See if these experts in their field are truly up to the task!

Wong, Zachary, author

Flannes, Steven, 1950- author

Levin, Ginger

De Janasz, Suzanne C., author

Dewey Library - PS3557.A36 T48 2019

Rotch Library - G70.212.C58 2017

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Dewey Library - HD8081.A5 H54 2018

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Dewey Library - HF5549.R64 2019

Dewey Library - QD40.O86 2019

Windsor, Kim

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee

Brookfield, Stephen, author

Pohl, Michael

Cottrell, Stella, author

Barrera, Susan

Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives. Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, author, issuing body

Cottrell, Stella, author

Jennings, Patricia A., author

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Barker Library - TA645.H374 2019

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Guided by the recent Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states are scrambling to incorporate nonacademic skills into school measurement systems, raising the question: “What measures should schools use and for which purpose?”

Read, Siew Hean, author

Use this link and code JAVAJAB to get 20% off your registration for FluentConf 2013! Panel AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Discussion 00:57 - What does it mean to be a “web developer” “T-shaped skills” 11:01 - Minumum level entry skills you need to become a web developer HTML CSS JSHint Jade less.js jquery 19:39 - CSS Jade 24:24 - Mid-Senior level skills you need to become a web developer Networking HTTP Wireshark Build systems node.js NoSQL Netcat MVC frameworks Preprocessers REST Picks Prime Workers (AJ) Adobe Illustrator (AJ) Vagrant (Merrick) Puppet (Merrick) Mountain West Ruby Conference (Jamison) TXJS (Jamison) Breeze.js (Joe) edge.js (Joe) 'Arrested Development' Comes Back On Netflix On May 26, So Get Extra Sleep Now: Linda Holmes (Joe) Intro to Networking with Netcat and NodeJS (AJ) Intro to HTTP with Netcat, Node, Connect (AJ) Next Week Marionette.js with Derick Bailey Transcript [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] JAMISON:  Hey guys and welcome to JavaScript Jabber. I’m your guest host today, Jamison Dance. Chuck is at Mount West Ruby Conference today and we have a bunch of panelists today. The first one is AJ O’Neal. AJ:  Yo! Yo! Yo! Coming at you as live as I can from Provo, Utah. JAMISON:  We’ve got Merrick Christensen. MERRICK:  What’s up? JAMISON:  And we’ve got Joe Eames. JOE:  Hey, how’s it going? JAMISON:  Today, we’re talking about just general web development skill sets, like what do you need to know to be a web developer? We should probably start off and define what a web developer is first because I think that it’s a really overloaded term. What do you guys think it means to be a ‘web developer’? I’m doing air quotes right now. JOE:  Merrick and I have had some conversations about this and it’s like I feel like his opinion of what a web developer is, is slightly different than mine. And maybe I’m coming more in line with what his definition is. So, I want to hear his first. MERRICK:  My definition? JOE:  Yeah, go. MERRICK:  So, one of the things that I see a lot of people saying as a web developer is people who come from traditional software engineering backgrounds and they come thinking that they can avoid HTML and CSS altogether. I think that’s a really dangerous approach because then you end up moving too much into JavaScript. And then, you have the opposite problem where people just don’t understand programming well and they end up with sort of jQuery spaghetti code. Which I think is okay for a lot of the brochure style sites, a lot of the maybe WordPress or content driven sites you can get by with just being really solid at HTML/CSS and then below average with JavaScript. But I think if you want to be a web application developer, you’re going to have to be solid on all three of those technologies, CSS, HTML, JavaScript and depending on the app that may include CSS preprocessors et cetera. JOE:  You said web application developer, right? MERRICK:  Yeah. I think there’s a difference. JOE:  Yeah, okay. For mine, one of the things that I feel like is I’m weak with CSS, right? And so, I kind of have this disdain about people that are like, “Oh, you don’t know CSS, huh? Well, that’s a problem.” And I want to say, “Well, yeah I’m not great with CSS.” I can tread water. But I can’t take a screen shot that some designer puts together in Illustrator and then turn it into a web page and feel like I’m doing it right. I always want to turn to an expert and say, “Hey, what do you think of this layout?

The panelists talk about what skills you need to be considered a professional web developer.

Check out ReactRally: A community React conference in Salt Lake City, UT from August 24th-25th!

03:36 - John Sonmez Introduction

• Twitter
• GitHub
• Simple Programmer
• The Entreprogrammers Podcast
• Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual by John Sonmez
• How to Market Yourself as a Software Developer Course

04:29 - Mastermind Groups

• Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Napoleon Hill

05:53 - “Soft Skills”

• Why Care About Soft Skills?
  • People Skills
  • Finances
  • Fitness

11:53 - Learned vs Innate

• Lifting Limited Beliefs
• Practice

14:14 - Promotion (Managerial) Paths

• The Peter Principle

17:52 - “Marketing”

• Value: Give Away 90% / Charge For 10%
• Seeming “Spammy” (Resistance to Sell)
• Neil Patel's Blog
• Documentation for Yourself
  • AJ O'Neal: How to Tweet from NodeJS

29:53 - Get Up and CODE!

• #086: Figure Skating and Software Development with Aimee Knight
• #067: Weight Loss Plan for Charles (Max Wood)

33:47 - Burnout

• Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
• Systems and Habits (Routines)
  • Methods of Execution

Get John’s How to Market Yourself as a Software Developer Course for $100 off using the code JSJABBER

Comment on this episode for your chance to win one of two autographed copies of Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual by John Sonmez

Picks

The Recurse Center (Jamison)
Code Words Blog (Jamison)
DayZ Player Sings (And Plays Guitar) For His Life (Jamison)
Demon (Jamison)
Mastodon: Leviathan (Jamison)
Jan Van Haasteren Puzzles (Joe)
Hobbit Tales from the Green Dragon Inn (Joe)
AngularJS-Resources (Aimee)
Superfeet Insoles (Aimee)
Good Mythical Morning (AJ)
The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz (Chuck)
Streak (John)
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber (John)
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition by Robert B. Cialdini (John)
Do the Work by Steven Pressfield (John)
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield (John)

JSJ 274 Amazon Voice Services and Echo Skills with Terrance Smith

On today’s episode of JavaScript Jabber, we have panelists Joe Eames, Aimee Knight, Charles Max Wood, and we have special guest Terrance Smith. He’s here today to talk about the Amazon Alexa platform. So tune in and learn more about Amazon Voice Services!

[01:00] – Introduction to Terrance Smith

Terrance is from Hacker Ferrer Software. They hack love into software.

[01:30] – Amazon Voice Service

What I’m working on is called My CareTaker named probably pending change. What it will do and what it is doing will be to help you be there as a caretaker’s aid for the person in your life. If you have to take care an older parent, My CareTaker will be there in your place if you have to work that day. It will be your liaison to that person. Your mom and dad can talk to My CareTaker and My CareTaker could signal you via SMS or email message or tweet, anything on your usage dashboard, and you would be able to respond. It’s there when you’re not.

[04:35] – Capabilities

Getting started with it, there are different layers. The first layer is the Skills Kit for generally getting into the Amazon IoT. It has a limited subset of the functionality. You can give commands. The device parses them, sends them to Amazon’s endpoint, Amazon sends a call back to your API endpoint, and you can do whatever you want. That is the first level. You can make it do things like turn on your light switch, start your car, change your thermostat, or make an API call to some website somewhere to do anything.

[05:50] – Skills Kit

Skills Kit is different with AVS. Skills Kit, you can install it on any device. You’re spinning up a web service and register it on Amazon’s website. As long as you have an endpoint, you can register, say, the Amazon Web Services Lambda. Start that up and do something. The Skills Kit is literally the web endpoint response. Amazon Voice Services is a bit more in-depth.

[07:00] – Steps for programming

With the Skills Kit, you register what would be your utterance, your skill name, and you would give it a couple of sets of phrases to accept. Say, you have a skill that can start a car, your skill is “Car Starter.” “Alexa tell Car Starter to start the car.” At which point, your web service will be notified that that is the utterance. It literally has a case statement. You can have any number of individual conditional branches outside of that. The limitation for the Skills Kit is you have to have the “tell” or “ask” and the name of the skill to do whatever. It’s also going to be publicly accessible. For the most part, it’s literally a web service.

[10:55] – Boilerplates for AWS Lambda

Boilerplates can be used if you want to develop for production. If you publish a skill, you get free AVS instance time. You can host your skill for free for some amount of time. There are GUI tools to make it easier but if you’re a developer, you’re probably going to do the spin up a web service and deal it that way.

[11:45] – Do you have to have an Amazon Echo?

At one point, you have to have the Echo but now there is this called Echoism, which allows you to run it in your browser. In addition to that, you can potentially install it on a device like a Raspberry Pi and run Amazon Voice Services. The actual engine is on your PC, Mac, or Linux box. You have different options.

[12:35] – Machine learning

There are certain things that Amazon Alexa understand now that it did last year or time before that like understanding utterances and phrases better. A lot of the machine learning is definitely under the covers. The other portion of it Alexa Voice Service, which is a whole engine that you have untethered access to other portions like how to handle responses. That’s where you can build a custom device and take it apart. So the API that we’re working with here is just using JSON and HTTP.

[16:40] – Amazon Echo Show

You have that full real-time back and forth communication ability but there is no video streaming or video processing ability yet. You can utilize the engine in such a way that Amazon Voice Services can work with your existing tool language. If you have a Raspberry Pi and you have a camera to it, you can potentially work within that. But again, the official API’s and docs for that are not available yet.

[27:20] – Challenges

There’s an appliance in this house that listens to everything I say. There’s that natural inclination to not trust it, especially with the older generations. Giving past that is getting people to use the device. Some of the programming sides of it are getting the communication to work, doing something that Alexa isn’t pre-programmed to do. There isn’t a lot of documentation out there, just a couple of examples. The original examples are written in Java and trying to convert it to Node or JavaScript would be some of the technical challenges. In addition, getting it installed and setup takes at least an hour at the beginning. There’s also a learning curve involved.

[29:35] – Is your product layered in an Echo or is your product a separate device?

Terrance’s product is a completely separate device. One of the functionality of his program is medicine reminders. It can only respond to whatever the API calls from Amazon tells you to respond to but it can’t do anything like send something back. It can do an immediate audio response with a picture or turn on and off a light switch. But it can’t send a message back in like two hours from now. You do want your Alexa device to have (verbally) a list of notifications like on your phone. TLDR, Terrance can go a little further with just the Skills Kit.

[32:00] – Could you set it up through a web server?

Yes. There are examples out there. There’s Alexa in the browser. You can open up a browser and communicate with that. There are examples of it being installed like an app. You can deploy it to your existing iPhone app or Android app and have it interact that way. Or you can have it interact independently on a completely different device like a Raspberry Pi. But not a lot of folks are using it that way.

[33:10] – Monetization

Amazon isn’t changing anything in terms of monetization. They make discovery a lot easier though. If you knew the name of the app, you could just say, “Alexa, [tell the name of the app].” It will do a lazy load of the actual skill and it will add it to your available skill’s list.

However, there is something called the Alexa Fund, which is kind of a startup fund that they have, which you can apply for. If you’re doing something interesting, there is a number of things you have to do. Ideally, you can get funding for whatever your product is. It is an available avenue for you.

[36:25] – More information, documentation, walkthroughs

The number one place to go to as far as getting started is the Amazon websites. They have the Conexant 4-Mic Far-Field Dev Kit. It has 4 mics and it has already a lot of what you need. You have to boot it up and/or SSH into it or plug it up and code it. They have a couple of these kits for $300 to $400. It’s one of the safe and simpler options.

There are also directions for the AVS sites which is under Alexa Voice Services, where you can go to the Github from there. There will give you directions using the Raspberry Pi.  If not that, there’s also the Slack chatroom. It is alexaslack.com. Travis Teague is the guy in charge in there.

Picks

Joe Eames

• Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak

Aimee Knight

• Conference: React Rally
• Pancakes

Charles Max Wood

• Conference: Angular Dev Summit
• Conference: React Dev Summit
• JavaScript Jabber Slack

Terrance Smith

• Language: Elm
• Youtube channel: The School of Life
• Game: Night in the Woods
• Hacker Ferret Software
• Hackerferret.com

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Charles talks about the new direction he has for the company. He wants  to drive people to the point that they have the skills that make people want to hire and work with them, to teach them how to ‘Max out’. Today the panel the skills that developers need to progress in their careers: social skills. 

The panel talks about their observations from work that the people who advanced and grow in their career were the ones with social skills, not necessarily with technical skills. The company wants to get stuff done, and if your social skills are getting in the way of projects getting done because you can’t work with others, you are not that useful to the company, and you will be stuck in the lower ranks while others who may not have the same technical skills will rise in the ranks because they are pleasant to work with. Mani talks about his personal experience getting laid off for lacking these soft skills. But then he read the book 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green, realized his shortcomings, and started to apply just one lesson from the book. Within 6 months, he was promoted.

Mani delves deeper into the first lesson taught in 48 Laws of Power, Never Outshine the Master. Fundamentally, this means that you don’t try to prove in meetings how good you are, or that they’re wrong, or that you think that you are better than them. The more you the aforementioned things, the less likely you will be to get promoted or trusted. Mani talks about how he used to do these things and how it cost him multiple jobs. When he put this lesson into practice, he changed his methods and the boss started to like him, leading to his promotion 6 months later. The panel discusses this lesson and what benefits can come from it. 

Mani shares another lesson that he learned through the story of a friend trying to get him to invest in his business. After Mani refused to invest multiple times, his friend stopped asking him to invest, but instead asked him for business advice. Eventually, Mani invested in the business because when he saw that his friend was influenced by his advice, it engendered trust between them. The panel agrees that if you want to influence someone, you have to be influenced by them. It is important to treat someone as a person rather than an asset or wallet, and ensure them that their investment is not their end goal. One of the most fundamental social skills that you must be able to like people, because other people can smell manipulation. 

The panel transitions to talking about the paradoxical nature of social skills and that they are often the opposite of what you think will work in a situation. Unfortunately, there will always be difficult people to work with. To illustrate how to work with difficult people, Mani shares the story of how Gengis Khan was convinced not to destroy a city of artists and engineers by his advisor, Yelu Chucai. Gengis Khan agreed because Yelu Chucai was able to structure his plea in a way that would also benefit Gengis Khan. 

The conversation shifts to how to conduct an interview to see if a candidate will fit into your team culture. First, you must know what you’re looking for and understand your team culture, and then ask for stories of when they accomplished something in the interview. If every story is all about how they did something and they don’t include other people, then that may indicate their self-centeredness. They discuss the Ben Franklin Effect. 

For those listeners wondering where to begin with all this self improvement, Mani has read over 2,000 books on business and offers a course on his website, 2000books.com. Mani has teamed up with JavaScript Jabber to offer a special deal to the listeners of this podcast. To get lifetime access to Mani’s courses at a 40% discount, follow the links below. 

Panelists

• Steve Edwards

• Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Mani Vaya

Sponsors

• React Native Radio

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan

• React Round Up

Links

• 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green

• The 360 Degree Leader by John C. Maxwell

• The Ben Franklin Effect

• javascriptjabber.com/social and 2000books.com 

  • 40% off for the first 200 people

  • Coupon code: Jabber

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Steve Edwards:

• Rex Chapman

Charles Max Wood:

• BombBomb

• IndieHackers.com 

• Stolen bike prank

Mani Vaya: 

• How I Built This by NPR

• As a Man Thinketh

Lahire, Nathalie

Skillen, James R., author

Ferguson, Matt

Interview with Eileen Birch, Ph.D., author of Self-perception in Children Aged 3 to 7 Years With Amblyopia and Its Association With Deficits in Vision and Fine Motor Skills

£Attractive: QinetiQ
For more latest jobs and jobs in London & South East England visit brightrecruits.com

Meor Osman, Wan Sofiah, author

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